Can’t Escape Hunger?

We’ve been learning since our school days that food is essential for growth and development of our body. It is the primary source of energy for our body and helps in balancing our biological system. In simple words, there is no survival without food. But most of us have forgotten that food is but a part of our life, not our whole life. Hunger is a natural phenomenon and there’s no way we can escape it, but we can always escape excessive eating. In other words, we must avoid eating for pleasure as much as possible and focus on eating only when hunger makes a call. Having a balanced relationship with food is imperative in order to lead a healthy and productive life. But how can we achieve such a relationship with food? Well, the answer is quite simple. Start eating mindfully i.e. make food choices from your mind and not your heart.

Eat To Live Long!

To eat is a necessity but to eat intelligently is an art. Everybody eats to live their lives but how many of us really eat to live a long and healthy life?

We all love to make a few changes in our routine diet because monotony is quite boring, but it’s important to consider health while making those changes as ‘health is wealth’. But what makes us healthy? Well, to find an answer we just need to focus on our dietary patterns and the food we generally eat instead of focusing on individual nutrients such as dietary cholesterol, fat and specific vitamins.

Eating healthy does not necessarily mean that you have to eat fat-free, sugar-free complicated over the top, food free food. Choose food that contains fats from healthy sources such as plants and at the same time reduce your intake of unhealthy foods like red meat, whole milk, processed and refined grains and sugars etc.

Including more fruits and vegetables, whole grains, vegetable oils, seeds, nuts etc can reduce the risk of any chronic life taking disease and help us lead a healthy life.

If Hunger Is Not The Problem Then Food Is Not The Solution

Do you believe that food is the solution to every problem in your life? Do you feel like hogging away your worries? If so, then you must know that food is only meant to fix your hunger, not your problems.

Sometimes we get so out of touch with our emotions that we fail to differentiate between our thoughts and emotions and when this happens food becomes a means to escape from whatever is causing the discomfort, a drug to numb the pain. As a result, we lose our ability to think rationally about our physical need for food and give in to our desire to wash away the pain with emotional eating. This kind of hunger, which is merely driven by our emotions, is also called head hunger, which doesn’t get satisfied easily as our thoughts get preoccupied with thoughts of food. As a result, we lose our self-control and tend to eat much more than the body can handle.

So next time when you are stressed and craving for food, ask yourself ‘Am I hungry?’ If the answer is no, then food can never make you feel any better. In fact the more you try to use food as a solution, the more problems it’s going to create. So try to find the real solution before you create another problem.